#whats the statute of limitations on those idek

[quinloki]

THE MOST TAME WAS THE BRACES?

Jesus. My mom likes to joke that I was a handful and I'm tempted to say well at least I didn't do that. I was actually her mild child so idek what she's on when she says that. Had to pick my sister up from a party one time and she ran away into a corn field.

I'm over here in awe at your level of badassery, Quin.

Ah, hahaha, idk if it's badassery, most of it was really just dumb luck.

But I mean, I think at least part of why I'm content being a homebody at this point in my life is that I didn't have too many dull moments between... oh, 14-28 or so.

Joy and sorrow both for sure.

under a cut cause I went on a bit of a ramble!

I've had a rat fall out of a ceiling and land on me, a giant moth knocked itself out on a light and landed on me 😩, I had some drunk guy shove me down concrete steps once and ended up with just a couple bruises, had to escort police to the site of a several weeks' dead 6' long boa, learned how to disarm someone in my karate class because my ex was talking about, well, concerning things and I lived alone.

I've been in a handful of fist fights, and only lost one. Not that I should've really gotten into any, admittedly, but still. Survived 6 different stalkers, a one-night stand who turned out to be a drug dealer, and two "you shouldn't meet people on the internet face to face without telling anyone that's what you're doing" scenarios - for which I am quite grateful neither went terribly wrong.

And I don't mean those all bad things, just a short list of stuff that happened.

But I've lived out of my car, melted a steak to a pan (nearly setting my home on fire in the process, thank you whoever was looking out for me on that one), committed a crime for which the statute of limitations has LONG since passed (petty theft - I have said I was not a bright teen), had a job I still can't talk about cause that NDA is valid for the rest of my life (and the job was boring AF I swear on my smut-riddled soul).

I will say one of the coolest moments of my life was kind of silly, but I still love that I did it. I was working security - my cousin was my boss at the time, and trust me I got nothing special for it - but security tended to get along with maintenance.

One of the maintenance guys had stopped at the desk to talk to my cousin, and I lifted his keys. You know those big loop maintenance key rings with like 30 keys on them? Yeah, I pulled it clean off him and he didn't notice. He started to leave and I lifted my hand up, ring and all for my boss to see, and he just starts laughing, calls the maintenance guy to come back and get his keys.

I doubt I have the skill to do something like that anymore, but it might be fun to practice.

[bigskydreaming]

Why did (do?) the Magivians film you with rage?

Racism, homophobia and anti-survivors trifecta. They had an epic case of Bury Your Gays back in S1 where like, their gay character had to kill his new love interest in self-defense after that guy was possessed by the bad guy, and then when he was understandably upset afterwards because they’d made a point to hype this guy up as the first guy he’d ever had real feelings for, his friends were like boohoo get over it, which was like…swell, lol. Oh and then that same character ended up forced into a marriage with a woman for the sake of some fantasy kingdom he didn’t even give a shit about and was all of his friends’ quest way more than it was his, and only then did they decide to have him say a line about how he was mostly gay but was occasionally into women so bi a little bit even though he’d always ID’d as gay before then so it felt like a patch job to cover up the fact that they only belatedly realized oh hey forcing our gay lead into a hetero marriage he doesn’t want to be in is maybe Not A Good Look. 

Oh and I do remember catching a bit of a S2 episode where like, the gay character was throwing an orgy in the palace to make himself feel better for being stuck in fantasy land ruling over a fantasy kingdom he gave no fucks about and was bored and lonely in….only to get chewed out by his wife slash queen (a native inhabitant of fantasy kingdom) about how rapey and coercive that was and an abuse of his power as king because his subjects didn’t feel like they had the option of opting out. Which to be perfectly clear, is an absolutely valid point to make….BUT the fact remains that like, they chose to write in that angle, and they chose to make their gay character the one to learn that Important Lesson About Consent and Power Dynamics….but oh yeah, they ALSO chose to write this particular gay character as forced into oh yeah, a hetero marriage he did not ask for and clearly did not want, for the sake of mystic prophecy bullshit resulting from someone ELSE’S personal quest. And that was just….so…oblivious to me? Its like….ummm….could you not have the Straights educate The Pervy Deviant Gay on Consent Issues WHILST FORCING HIM INTO A HETERO MARRIAGE WITH ONLY HIS EXTREMELY RELUCTANT AND DUBIOUS CONSENT AT BEST??? Hellooooooooooooooo??

Then the racism side of the Awful triangle was like, their only two PoC in the first season (other than the blind black headmaster who was all kinds of Tropey ‘Cryptic and Thus Untrustworthy’ from the way the narrative was framed which, no, stop)….the only other two PoC in the first season and main cast were the girl who just so happened to be set up by the plot as the one revealed to be the ‘traitor’ or whatever who was there at the school under false pretenses and just stealing magic for other hedge witches. Like yes, she was under duress because they were threatening her mom I think? But I mean it was still like super predictable having her be the character that was put in that position and forced to fill that role. And then Penny, the man of color in the main cast, like, again I only watched the first season sporadically because I was like Nope every other episode and just skimmed in the hopes it would get better cuz everyone I knew kept raving about it, but I specifically remember one scene where like Penny was singled out by one of his teachers and told how he was super powerful like way more than any of his peers because he had like wild magic or something…BUT then the teacher went on to basically tell him this was more of a curse than a gift because his own power would eventually burn him out and destroy him or something like that. It was definitely framed as an inevitability, like, just his fate, a natural consequence to being the kind of magician he was innately…super powerful but with a shortened lifespan essentially as a trade off, with no way around that. 

And he was something like a Traveler, able to take himself and his friends between worlds? Which was great and super necessary for the plot but also a big part of what made his magic so destructive for him himself in the long run, so essentially the man of color got set up to be a glorified taxi cab for his white friends aka the LITERAL plot vehicle, with it announced to him very early on in the show that like ‘dont be too happy about how mad powerful you are, cuz its basically just gonna kill you way before all your friends end up biting it, sucks to be you kinda’. Again, this was early on in the show so I don’t know if that changed or they added more context to that later, but just the fact that his character in particular, like Kady’s, just so HAPPENED to be the one singled out for that particular plot niche and accompanying fate, like….that was fucking bogus from the jump.

Oh and also there was that really cool (in that not all sort of way) and totally not at all predictable (in that it totally was sorta way) antiblackness that reared its ugly head the second S2 introduced the oft-mentioned ‘barbarian kingdom’ that bordered Fantasy Land…..because hey guess whether or not the first appearance of more than one black person at a time on the show was when a whole bunch of black people showed up in S2 as oh yeah, you guessed it….the natives of the neighboring BARBARIAN Kingdom. Classy, Magicians. Way classy.

And then the anti-survivors angle of the Triangle of Suck, like, the show fucking HATES ‘bad survivors.’ You know, survivors who don’t embrace forgiveness and tra-la-la their way into the sunset and recovery while weaving daisy chains and leaving all their anger and thoughts of vengeance and retribution behind them in the past? Like, god forbid a survivor fucking HATE the person who hurt them and want to make them pay, which was essentially Julia’s S2 arc I believe? And boy was she fucking punished for that. Shit just got worse and worse for her, and it only got better when she decided to try the Healing Power of Forgiveness! Unlike one of her fellow survivors, raped by the same bastard who hurt her, who was also on the same Vengeance Quest as her, except she got murdered extremely graphically and painfully onscreen in like…narratively framed as a See Kids This Is Why Revenge Is Bad And You Should Not kinda way, that Julia was pretty clearly meant to learn from and Make Different Choices. 

Oh and let’s not forget that the initial antagonist of the series, the dreaded Beast who killed tons of people and was the one who possessed the gay guy that the other gay guy had to kill right after their makeout session in self defense cuz lol why would that be traumatic…yeah, that Beast…..let’s not forget that he was another Bad Survivor, a guy who was molested by one of the series’ Significant Backstory People years and years ago when he was just a kid. And thus he was pretty blatantly a case of Look How Stewing In Your Hate For What Happened To You Instead of Forgetting All Your Worries and Your Strife Will ABSOLUTELY Turn You Into A Literal Monster Who Murders People and Is Evil and Bad And Must Be Slain For the Good of Alllllll the Land.

And there was actually a lot more than just that because Survivors was a definite Thing on the show, with lots of them showing up and established as being survivors in various ways and almost all of them like….being the focus of the series like….perpetual hard on for torture and torturous death scenes for various satellite characters. Like don’t get me wrong, the series pretty much kills people left and right, its just it weirdly just so happens that the first people standing in line to either the left or the right tended to be PoC, women, survivors, gay/bi characters or characters who lucked out and got to be all of the above for the handful of scenes before they met their untimely ‘Wouldn’t Wish It On My Worst Enemy Let Alone On My Or Any Friend of Mine’s Only Representation On This Show’ demise.

Anyway, yeah I hate that show and it dinged all my NOPE alarms hard from day one and I kept checking back in on it over the first season and then a little bit off and on after that in the hopes it had gotten better because I kept fucking hearing all over twitter and tumblr how amazing it was and progressive it was and I’d watch the latest episode, jump up, yank my hair out and screech like a gibbon monkey while speaking in tongues and asking the universe to help explain to me what the fuck was I missing here, where was all this lauded Progressivism I was supposed to be taking away from all the miserable, tortured and murdered  - and also abused, raped and exploited  - PoC and occasional white gays or women tossed in to round out the variety pack??!?! Just did not see it, at all, Error 404 Not Found, Did Not Compute, and then I’d hop back on tumblr and see people raving about the same stuff that just whipped me into a frothing rage and I’d be like I DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE WHAT IS GOING ON ARE WE USING THE SAME WORDS OR DO I NOT KNOW WHAT THE WORDS MEAN CORRECTLY OR….

Ugh. Yeah. So like I said….nooooot a fan. And also, fans of the show plz don’t @ me if I got things mixed up there or inaccurately remembered a scene I referenced, I’m not claiming to have perfect recall of a show that was actively pissing me off while I watched it and thus I was kinda TRYING not to pay full attention to. I just know that I definitely got a full helping of racism, homophobia and anti-survivor bullshit in SOME form or another from each and every episode I did watch. I freely admit that like, I’m not necessarily describing or denoting the actual things that pissed me off or registered that way to me, like.. for sure accurately here….again, I haven’t watched the show at all in a couple years and I’m not trying to be like This Is Definitely What Happened In This Scene and This Scene. Its more just one of those things where like, I definitely remember these are reasons I hated the show and I’ve put a lot of effort into NOT thinking about it or remembering it, so this is just how that jumbled mess all came out right now while trying to sort through it all and remember specific instances of the Triangle of Suck that made me rage so hard. There’s a reason I’ve never gone around actively engaging in Magicians Discourse or encouraging people not to watch it, lol, I don’t claim to be an expert on it or to have taken extensive notes of my Rage Reasons at the time of watching. Just that like….they were definitely there, and this was the general vicinity of the ones I can think of off the top of my head.